Ask HN: What's it like being a “digital nomad”?

I can't imagine many people are 'nomadic' as the amount of hassle with moving location every few months would likely eat into productivity. Time zones are also a large factor as you might end up sleeping during the day and working at night (Bangkok has a 11-hour time difference with EST).

What a lot of people are doing is simply taking advantage of the visa free status a western passport provides to remotely work in a low-cost location. Usually Central or South America or South East Asia.

I honestly think that a more worthwhile pursuit is become a remote worker in a cheaper area of your own country or a country you can easily locate legally.

For example contracting for London-based companies whilst living in rural NI or North East England.

Check out the forums on Nomad List (https://nomadlist.com/) for real inside discussions.

The mainstream media and social networks, especially Instagram persist cliche images like drinking a coconut with a laptop on the beach in Costa Rica living on the cheap. Reality might not be that far off, but there are tons of unique challenges with travel and taxes and no one is really doing that every day.

It is and it isn't.

I moved around a little and ended up settling in a rural area of my own country. It's where I want to be.

And I think that's what being a digital nomad is about: living where you want to live.

Traveling is fun, but for me, and probably most people, it gets old and I just want to be home. I can fulfill my mind's "travel requirements" with a trip or two per year, as it turns out. No need to live on the road.

I'm more productive with a steady routine, anyway.

I wrote a medium length piece on this you might be interested in.

https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalnomad/comments/46o7ws/my_exp...

The part that might be most relevant to your question:

"There's a decent chance you'll get sick and tired of the negative aspects of being a DN sooner than you'd think. Before you've ever been a DN it's easy to understand what the good parts of being a DN will be: who the heck doesn't want to know what it's like to live in Scandinavia or Japan or on a beach in the Caribbean or to learn to dance salsa in Colombia! But you really can't understand the negative social or psychological aspects of long-term nomadism without having experienced them. I hope this part of my post doesn't get me downvotes because this place [reddit.com/r/digitalnomads] seems to only really want to talk about feel-good stuff, but there really are drawbacks to being a DN.

In the initial months of being a DN I was meeting new people, learning the basics of a new language, dating some interesting people that seemed very different than any I'd met before and had accents like James Bond girls, etc. It was amazing. But what you start to get worn down by is the fact that every month, or every three months, or whatever your period ends up being, you've got to start over socially or romantically or whatever and climb that mountain all over again. Moving to a new place and knowing no one can be exhilarating, but it's also a lot of work and takes a bit of psychological fortitude to push yourself to go out there to an event or a bar or anything and go up to new people with the possibility of rejection. Even if you're a natural born extrovert (I'm pretty extroverted actually) it just gets tiring to have to keep losing people when you leave and restart. Even if you don't consciously change, you may find that one year in you can't force yourself to be as enthusiastic when meeting new people because in the back of your mind you're subconsciously aware that you probably won't have them in your life in 6 months. If you're dating while traveling it can be a whole 'nother level, for a multitude of reasons. You start being intimate with someone then a week later you're lying in bed alone again and asking yourself if you'd been better off just staying there. You'd certainly have been less lonely. You may find yourself starting to treat people as replaceable even if you are a more traditional person before you became a DN.

Something I noticed after some time was that in some ways you could tell who'd been a traveler or a DN for a long, long time. The people I met who'd been doing it for years didn't have as much enthusiasm when meeting new people. Ask yourself what kind of person is able to stay emotionally healthy when they're not maintaing any long-term friendships or relationships for years and years at a time - only making surface level friends that they throw out every few months. That person is either very introverted / self-reliant emotionally and friendship-wise or they're crazy (the exception is a DN who has travels with someone else or goes back and forth between places they already have friends or loved ones). There's a joke that goes around in traveling circles (didn't invent it myself): "what do you call a 5-year nomad? a sociopath." Hopefully I don't ruffle the feathers of any 5-year DN readers here, I'll be the first to admit that towards the end of my DN-hood I was seeing some of these changes in myself. I'm not saying that long-term DNs are all emotionally unhealthy or crazy heartless bastards, but I am saying that it's a struggle that you may not think about before you've experienced it. And it's the main reason I think so many people eventually stop and settle somewhere. I think there are definitely people who can stay emotionally healthy, who can keep the twinkle in their eye, but I'm just saying not everyone can.

Which leads to me my last point - I did drop out of the DN rat race. I got some useful data for my life about what cultures and languages I'd like to learn about and engage with more in my future. I have a short list of 2-3 places I'd go if I ever decide to leave where I currently am. And now that I've seen a lot I know exactly why I love the place that I'm living (and also what it lacks :( wah, wah, wah). There's a handful of places that I lived that I absolutely loved. None of them were places I expected to love. One of them is actually - shame on me - the United States.

If you want to be a digital nomad, I'd suggest having an idea of why you want to, considering what you want to discover or find out while being one, and plan your time around that. You may get tired of the constant travel after a year or two or three, and that's OK. Just keep that in mind when planning so you can accomplish what you want in that timeframe."